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21 December 2012

Non-Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting Startups

The Non-Entrepreneur's Guide to Starting in Startups - Forbes: "A few weeks ago I spoke to thirty undergrads interested in entrepreneurship. While the questions varied, one theme was consistent: Where do I start? It’s something I hadn’t thought about in a while and provoked me to generate the following list of resources organized by type. The sections are organized by time and monetary cost, with Twitter being the least costly and events being the most costly. . . . "

Richard Branson on Being Richard Branson | Entrepreneur.com: "Entrepreneur: Small-business owners around the world look up to you. Is it hard for you to remember those early struggles, connect with them, and give relevant advice? Branson: No, I remember them vividly. It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters -- and that's surviving. One of the best bits of advice I can give is, early on, when you're building a new business, try to find somebody to run it on a day-to-day basis to free yourself up to look at the bigger picture. But obviously you've got to get over the first hump."

Rebuilding the Web We Lost - Anil Dash: "Another essential step for breaking out of the current tech industry's predictable patterns will be for entrepreneurs and creators to educate themselves about the true history of the tech industry and its products. Our business tends to follow a few simple, repeating cycles, like moving from centralization to decentralization and back, or from interoperable communications to silos and back. But as we've discussed, you can't trust the tech press to teach you about the tech industry, so you'll have to know your shit. Fortunately, a lot of us old-timers are still around, and still answer our emails sometimes, so it's possible to just ask. Imagine if Instagram had simply asked the folks who used to work at Flickr, "Did you ever change your terms of service? What freaked people out?" And even better, we can blog our own progress, because if you didn't blog it, it didn't happen. In that way, we form our own community of practice, our own new peer review process for what we learn about making the web work the right way. . . ."

LONDON: UK retailer Comet shutting down, 6,900 jobs lost - Business Breaking News - MiamiHerald.com: "As in many parts of the world, retailers have struggled to respond to the host of retailers online, including Amazon.com, that often offer big discounts. In Britain, retailers have also struggled in the face of a nine-month recession that only ended in the third quarter of 2012, largely because of a summer boon related to London's hosting of the 2012 Olympic Games. Most forecasters think the British recovery will be patchy over the months and years to come as the country's main trading partners in Europe struggle in the face of a debt crisis and the government continues to cut costs and raise taxes in order to get the public finances back into shape. . . . "